On Mar 17, 2004 19:15 -0600, Philip Molter wrote: > We want to run multi-drive systems we have in a JBOD mode, where > each drive is basically a filesystem to itself. With the drives > we currently have, we expect to have multiple failures, primarily > unrecoverable ECC read errors or sometimes the drive just dying > altogether. > > How does ext[23] handle these two primary conditions? Using them > in a software RAID mode, I have sometimes seen problems with disks > hang all access to the filesystem and even the entire system, but > I'm not sure at what level that's happening (low-level driver? > scsi layer? raid layer? filesystem layer?). This is entirely an issue with the bus or SCSI layer, and not the filesystem. > If I have a drive fail taking out the entire ext3 filesystem, will > I be able to stop using the filesystem (say, my application gets > the error from the fs indicating some sort of problem in whatever > system call it's made, who cares what), forcibly unmount the > filesystem, and replace the drive? Or will the system panic? Or > worse, will my application just enter an uninterruptible sleep > never to return success or error? Of all Linux filesystems, I think you'll find that ext2/ext3 probably handle media and device errors the most gracefully (i.e. not panicing because of cascading errors, unless you want that with errors=panic). Whether you'll be able to unmount is really dependent on a lot of factors so it's hard to comment. When our storage servers (running ext3) have some catastrophic disk problem we can usually unmount. Cheers, Andreas -- Andreas Dilger http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/ http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/ _______________________________________________ Ext3-users@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ext3-users
